What do you think of cave/cavern diving?

[Teamcasa]

I guess it's like most other endeavors. Some people love it, some don't. For me, caves and wrecks hold little interest. I dive to have fun and see cool stuff. Old derelict wrecks hold no interest unless they hold large amounts of life. Same with caves, unless there is something interesting besides what I can see at Carlsbad Caverns, I'll pass.

Add to the above, I'm not a fan of diving anywhere where a simple oops moment kills me.

 

[Rhone Man]

I'm surprised that someone with Gentile's reputation would make a statement like that ...

I may have paraphrased it badly. When I get home tonight I'll look up his exact words. I think his core message though was: don't panic, it is often not as bad as it looks.

Anyhow, back to why people who like cave diving are all crazy... :crazyeye:

 

[Damselfish]

I don't even like being very far into a cave above water. When I see pictures I can sort of see some appeal in cruising through the formations, but I'm claustrophobic enough I know it's a place I shouldn't be.

 

[Tigerman]

I have only ever done cenotes as far as this topic goes, but WOW!
If I had the time and money to spend on it, that coulda easilly led me to go for the cave cert.. But fortunately for my wallet, I dont have the time

 

[Kevin Carlisle]

I may have paraphrased it badly. When I get home tonight I'll look up his exact words. I think his core message though was: don't panic, it is often not as bad as it looks.

Anyhow, back to why people who like cave diving are all crazy... :crazyeye:

well look at it this way. Most cave divers are out there every weekend if not more. So far zero deaths that I am aware of. How many divers died in open water this year?
Think I will take my chances in the cave.

 

[vinegarbiscuit]

The peace and tranquility of the caves is simply stunning. There's also incredible beauty in the formations of not only the caves themselves but also the striations in the clay that rests on the floor. Down there, you come face-to-face with the realization that your environs took millions of years to form, and its incredibly humbling to be part of that, even if it's only just for the blink of an eye in geological time. And hey - at the rate we humans are detroying our precious oceans and their ecosystems, caves may be the only diving option available in the future.

Cavern/cave training in itself was also a revelation. Cave training provides the tools to improve as an overall diver - not just in terms of fine-tuning buoyancy and trim, but also dive-planning, problem-solving, equipment configutation, and accident analysis. The classes were extremely demanding and kicked my butt, but I when I got my c-cards, I felt that I had truly earned them.

 

[Coldwater_Canuck]

I found this with data up to 1999: http://www.iucrr.org/fatalities.pdf

Some interesting points:
- Of 190 fatalities where open water certificaiton level was known, 168 didn't have a level higher than OW

- Of 190 fatalities where cave diving training status was known, 143 had no cave training, and a few more likely ha inadequate training

- Of 426 fatalities, 256 did not use a guideline

- Of 411 fatalities, 337 ended with 0 PSI (not sure exactly what to take from this though)

- Of 403 fatalities, 144 had no dive light and an additional 198 had no backup. Only 23 had 3 or more (which I believe is the minimum standard).

- from 1996 - 1999 there were 0-2 certified cave diver deaths per year recorded (most likely this is an accurate measurement of "deaths in USA": while there is foreign data thrown in, this seems very incomplete. For some reason prior to 1996 there were more.

So the overall picture I get is that with proper training, the number of deaths is relatively low, 1 or 2 a year in the US (not sure how many participants there are though).

 

[Kevin Carlisle]

If you get a chance look in volume 41 of the NACD journal. It has data from 1969-2007 comprised of the 368 divers who died in caves at that time. There is a good breakdown on age, sex, cert level. Not sure if you can see that online but if you can it is a very neat article. Volume 41 is from the second quarter of this year.

If anything makes us safer than the average diver is that we pay attention to everything. Small problems can turn into disaster for us or the cave system. We respect the system and follow the rules.

 

[SelkieDVM]

I'd like to take cavern at least, but don't know how far I'd go with it beyond that. It's not so much the danger factor, but the fact that I'm not sure it's worth the effort (and money) if I can only do maybe one cave trip a year.

 

[Peter Guy]

I am not a "cave person" in that I'd been in a couple of caves, found them vaguely interesting but not something I'd go very far out of my way to walk into. I am NOT a geologist nor a rock hound and thus rocks, in and of themselves, are really a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

A couple of years ago I did a Cenote tour with Lynne (TSandM) because she wanted me to do the tour with her. It was a mistake -- a double mistake.

She was hooked (as she wrote above) but so was I.

Just the fact of floating in a cave is worth every penny I've spent learning how to do this -- but the added intrigue of the formations, the challenges and yes, "the danger" aspects make cave diving a fabulous activity.

As a very young teenager I was enthralled with the space program and the Mercury 7 astronauts. I wanted to be one of them when I grew up -- but life intervened of course. Well, this is as close to being an astronaut as I am ever going to get.

When you float in a room, you are floating in space. It is like nothing else I've ever experienced.